Heather Urbanski

978-0-7864-6509-5

230pp/$40.00/February 2013

Academic Heather Urbanski
has taken his interest in science fiction film and television and
applied it to the phenomenon of the reboot in her monograph The
Science Fiction Reboot: Canon, Innovation and Fandom in Refashioned
Franchises.In this book
length work, she focuses her attention on the worlds of Star
Trek, V, Battlestar Galactica, and Star
Wars, with occasional forays into other films and television shows,
such as Stargate.

Despite the pop culture topic, Urbanski is writing for an academic
audience and her text is not always as easy to follow as its source
material. Urbanski makes heavy use of literary theory, mapping the
re-envisioning of the various television shows against the writings of
Brian McHale, Jason Mittell, Mieke Bal, and other academics who explore
the narrative processes that underline the surface story that is most
attractive to the casual viewer and even the fan.

Urbanski's interest is in
the reimagining itself, not in the business or artistic decisions that
cause a studio, producer, or director to tackle a reboot. She does
not worry about the story-telling possibilities, but rather looks at the
way those possibilities are carried out by the creators, writers, and
actors. The question is how does a different actor/character in
the same role change the story, especially when the original character
winds up showing up in a different role within the narrative (as with
Anna, the leader of the Visitors in the reboot of V and Diana,
the leaser in the original, and Anna's mother in the reboot).

The inclusion of the Star
Wars prequel films forms a large part of Urbanski's discussion, and
as I am more familiar with the Star Wars universe, I found the
discussion of the films very interesting. However, Urbanski never
fully made the case for them as reboots or refashioned franchises.
The continued the story begin in 1977's Star Wars, unlike the
recent Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek reboots which
actually did re-imagine the series. However, Urbanski's focus on Star
Wars ins a focus on the different ways the films tell their story if
watching in the internal chronological order or the order of release and
how the viewer's experience changes the films. It is only too bad
that Urbanski didn't include a comparison of those two viewing orders
with the so-called Machete
order.1

There are other reboots
which receive short shrift in Urbanski's study, and, too be fair, there
have been so many reboots recently, there is no way she could have
grappled with all of them. Most obviously missing is the Russell
T. Davies reboot of Doctor Who, which is a continuation of the
original series in much the way the Star Wars prequels were a
continuation of the original series, but Davies really did reimagine the
Time Lord's adventures, casting the show in a much darker light than the
earlier incarnation. Reboots of the less-than-successful Bionic
Woman or Joss Whedon's reimagining of his own Buffy, the Vampire
Slayer from the 1992 film to the 1997 television series are barely
discussed.

Although Science
Fiction Reboot is a relatively short book, Urbanski packs a lot of
theory and analysis of several television shows and films into those 200
pages. Primarily an academic look at narrative and the manner in
which common tropes can be reused to tell variations on old stories and
use old stories to tell new ones.